


still human

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Existentialism, Kavinsky is a content warning, M/M, Not a Great Time, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 23:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6350515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Proko rests his head against the window and stays quiet. You hate how still he is. He used to run restless fingers up your inseam, drum his hand on your thigh, count his knuckles or tug on his hem or <i>anything</i>. It was incessant. </p>
<p>It’s not like Kavinsky to get the details wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	still human

**Author's Note:**

> so, uh, here's a pairing, jumbled in with a big pile of thoughts on 'what if Ronan was too much for Gansey after Niall died and threw in with Kavinsky anyway' because all these boys hurt my heart. 
> 
> To no one's surprise, [telekinesiskid](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/) was super helpful beta'ing, she's the best

You don’t like the Mitsubishi graveyard. In the sunlight, it’s a surreal place where your eyes skip over each individually mangled hood, trying to find the seam of the illusion. On days like this, under a grey sky, it’s a monument to persistence, dull and ugly and filled with misshapen things that feel wrong in a primal, unsettling kind of way. Each car is uniquely terrible; even the ones that used to work have had their tyres cut, fake engines gutted, been set alight. Most are stacked with Kavinsky’s other creations, piles of unstable powders, decanters thick with black, unknowable liquids, collections of knives and guns and dangerous, useless hybrids. Sometimes there’s banging from the trunks. Everyone knows better than to open them.

But Kavinsky likes the place, so you all have to lay around, summer passing through the filter of beer and pills and bets on what he’s going to bring out of his head next. You just recline on the backseat of an almost-intact car, watching the game lazily from the shade. Today Proko’s curled up with you, feet pressed awkwardly beneath him to put his head at the right height for your hand. You stir circles through his hair and he contorts himself to your touch, only moving to take another swig of something rancid from an amber bottle.

He’s too still. He used to fidget, and it used to annoy you, but you miss it now. Outside, there’s an explosion big enough to rock your car, Skov swears and Kavinsky howls with laughter. Proko stares up at you, his eyes inky dark and warm and too terribly placid.

You feel your way down to the bruised swell on his cheek, remember Kavnisky trying to talk him into the fight – _come on, Proko, he’s too drunk to hit back_ – the scars on his shoulder, left by rough chips of glass – _lit it for you already, better throw it quick_ – the burns on his forearms, rounded cigarette scars – _he doesn’t fucking care, why shouldn’t I?_

He really doesn’t seem to care. Your thumb smooths over the rough, warped skin of his burns, and he offers you his bottle. It tastes like honey with a shot of gasoline, but you’re used to dream things and you choke a mouthful down. The aftertaste is sleep in the corner of your eyes, sweet and rotten and lasting. It makes you feel slow, makes the world less real, and it’s no wonder Proko likes it. You keep the bottle, and when he reaches for it, you tell him, “You’ve had enough.”

“Kavinsky says there’s no such thing as ‘enough’,” he protests, words sliding thoughtlessly through his teeth.

“K’s not right about everything.” It still feels a little like blasphemy to say it aloud. Proko blinks at you, but he looks a lot less complacent than he did a second ago. He knows what you’re thinking, and his eyes gleam with your secrets.

“You trying to turn him against me, Lynch?” Kavinsky leans in through the door, engine oil dripping down his left arm. He’s grinning, but you bet there’s a worse expression under his shades, something hard, something hungry. Kavinsky always seems ravenous these days.

You don’t care that he heard you, though Proko obviously does, and he pulls away from your side. You never quite got swallowed by the group like you were meant to. “You think I’m wrong?”

He snorts, dismissive. “Whatever you want to believe. Proko, come here, I need you for something.”

Proko crawls out of the car immediately, but you follow. The fruits of Kavinsky’s labour are stacked up between the cars, more bottles, more guns, something that looks dangerously like a grenade launcher, but Skov, Swan and Jiang are circled around the biggest prize. It’s a car, but not a real one; it’s all furious engine, ridiculous wheels, sweeping spoiler, iridescent black and red paint. The hood ornament is a tangled mess of three real logos. Looking in through the window, you can’t see a handbrake. You can only hope it’s got brakes at all. “Looks like a good car to kill yourself in,” you say, half-wry, half a very real question aimed at Kavinsky.

He gives you another grin, all incisor. “If it goes, it’s going to be incredible.”

“If it goes?”

“Proko,” Kavinsky says, jerking his head at the car. “Go turn it on, see if the engine explodes.”

Prokopenko’s eyes are gleaming, not stupid, not drugged beyond thought. But all the wires in his head got put back in reverse, and he goes, circling around to the driver’s side. You snatch his wrist before he can touch the handle, slam the door with your hip to hold it closed. Kavinsky groans, frustrated, but you’re staring into Proko’s sharp, quiet eyes. “You don’t have to,” you tell him.

He shrugs. “I know.”

Everything in you grates, flint dragging up your spine, your teeth grinding down like they’re trying to break each other. Around you, the Mitsubishis wait, filled with broken scraps of things that never would have worked. Somewhere is a burned out frame, black metal twisted around the charred bones of the night horror you’d caught in the car. Somewhere is Kavinsky’s first attempt at replacing Prokopenko, slurried flesh over bent bones. Nothing around you feels like it came from a dream.

You start pulling Proko to the BMW, the only car not provided by Kavinsky, the only car that hasn’t been replaced at least once. “For _fuck’s sake, Lynch_ ,” Kavinsky shouts after you, “He doesn’t _fucking matter_.”

You think you’ve got a headache; there’s a heavy throb against the walls of your skull as you turn back to glare, and every drop of dull fury in you pours out. Kavinsky is unaffected, so you turn to the other three. “You think he’s above replacing all of you, too?”

Kavinsky snarls. You shove Proko into the passenger seat, and you go, driving past a hundred failures as you pull out of the lot. You don’t have anywhere in mind beyond ‘away’, so you just coast along backroads, glaring up at the grey sky like it’s culpable. Proko rests his head against the window and stays quiet. You hate how still he is. He used to run restless fingers up your inseam, drum his hand on your thigh, count his knuckles or tug on his hem or _anything_. It was incessant.

It’s not like Kavinsky to get the details wrong.

“You’re getting bored of us,” he says eventually, so calm it takes you a moment to register. He doesn’t sound sad.

You’ve been bored for months. The worst of your anger has burned away and left you with ash. Kavinsky was there when you needed him, he was there after you broke Gansey’s glasses while he was still wearing them, but you can’t keep up in his arms-race for self-destruction. He’s the only player, and he still has an incredible lead.

You don’t say any of that to Proko. You say, “I’m sick of pills.”

He nods sagely, like he understands, and then he says, “You could drink instead,” and laughs when you cuff him. You still can’t work out if he’s sharp or slow. He might be both all the time, now. Kavinsky wouldn’t have seen him sober much.

In the end you do the only thing you know how to do when you’re trying to offer someone comfort – it takes you that long to realise that’s what you’re doing, even though Proko didn’t ask, even though Proko would probably say he doesn’t need it – and you take him to a chip shop. You drop a warm, greasy parcel into his lap, and you watch him eat like it’s something he outgrew and he’s doing it now out of nostalgia. There are scars on his hands. There’s dirt and blood and powder under his nails. He watches you watch him, and he eats, and he waits for you to get around to your point.

“What’s it like living with K?” you ask, like you didn’t do it yourself for a week, while you were trying to dream up a house with running water. You can hope it’s different for Proko.

“His place is nice,” Proko says, and you can’t tell if he sounds more vague than usual. “His mother hasn’t noticed me yet.” He doesn’t say he misses his grandmother. He throws the rest of the chips to a waiting flock and watches the birds fight, his hands lying deathly still in his lap.

You have to ask. “Were you really going to turn on that fucking car?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he lets his head loll back, eyes sliding shut.

You catch your fingers curling into fists and try to stop them, try not to blame Proko. He was always inclined to obey, a pack animal of the most loyal strain, and now he’s reborn with the strange mixed purpose of a dream thing. It’s hard to say how much is him and how much is Kavinsky and how much is just a mistake.

Nothing about Matthew is a mistake.

You tell Proko, “You shouldn’t do shit like that for him. You shouldn’t let him treat you like you’re disposable.”

He almost says it too quiet to hear: “Aren’t I?”

“ _No_ ,” you snap, immediate and furious. “You’re fucking not! Kavinsky doesn’t get it, he doesn’t get that you’re a _person_. He made you, but you’re not _his_.”

“I’m not who I was when I was alive,” he says, looking down at his unmoving fingers. He’s not wrong; you’d have to be stupid not to see the difference. His grandmother saw through him in a day. “I’m not _real_ anymore.”

“You’re as real as one of K’s guns,” you say, and he winces, gunshot ricocheting through both your minds. “You’re your own _thing_ now. Not the old one. Not a replacement.” If Matthew’s alive then Proko’s alive, and Matthew is the most _living_ person you know, the most important, the most precious. Sometimes you have nightmares about Kavinsky meeting him. They play out like all his interactions with Proko do.

Prokopenko is quiet. You wonder how hard Kavinsky tried to separate the real Proko out from the soup of his own thoughts, if he tried at all. You wonder how deep _Kavinsky_ is wired into him now. Eventually, he says, “Thanks,” and looks at you with his dark, dark eyes. When he leans in you can taste honey on his breath, you can taste jet fuel, you can taste sweat and rubber and leather and everything you can’t escape from.

Kavinsky was there after you found a bloody crowbar and needed to make something burn. Proko was there after you got broken glass on Gansey’s face and you needed something to sink into. He leaves a hand on your leg while you kiss him, and his fingers are still, not excited or twitching or crawling over-eager up your thigh. He’s not the old one. He is what he is. You close your hand over his, and don’t push him off you.

He pulls away eventually, leaves his fingers dead and laced with yours, smiles as vague as he always is. Soon he’ll go back to Kavinsky. Overhead, the grey clouds churn and the irresistible, magnet pull of Kavinsky is tightening. It used to work on you, too, but the wonder’s worn off now, the cheap, flashy recklessness of it all has worn through. Next time could be Proko again, or it could be one of the others. It won’t be you.

You drive Proko back, on the route that takes you past Monmouth, on the route that’s a mistake because you end up staring through warehouse windows and knowing how easily Gansey would forgive you. You could take Proko with you. Someone like Gansey would love him more for being a dream. Someone like Gansey wouldn’t press a Molotov into his hands and laugh when it went off, wouldn’t let him swallow strange pills just to see what they did, wouldn’t touch him hard enough to leave bruises, give him careless stinging bites, tell him what he looked like when the bullet went in.

But you have to take him where he wants to be.

You park the BMW between the hollow corpses of a hundred Mitsubishis, a dozen meters back from the bonfire that was Kavinsky’s new car, and you watch the fire reflected in Proko’s eyes. You tell him, “He’s going to kill you.”

Proko looks at you, dreamy and sober, real and unnaturally still. He already knows and he smiles with knowing, sharp and murky all at once. He says, “He’ll bring me back.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I'd love to know what you thought! I also [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) :V


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